Silly vanilla flare-stack alternative

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golfmiketango
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Silly vanilla flare-stack alternative

Post by golfmiketango »

This is just for funsies but I have often wondered if I could build a vanilla alternative to the Flare Stack mod (which provides a way to make in-game items disappear in a puff of smoke) using the time-honored technique of the biter petting zoo combined with flamethrower turrets. It turns out this works exactly as I'd hoped. Here's a picture of the system in operation (clickable for your magnifying pleasure):

Vanilla Flare Stack Alternative
Vanilla Flare Stack Alternative
VanillaFlareStack.png (4.72 MiB) Viewed 2767 times
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It's a bit hard to tell from the picture so I'll describe what's going on. I've isolated a single spawner in the middle of a square of flamethrower and laser turrets. The flamethrowers are configured so that a "turret range gap" exists in the middle of the structure and the spawner will not be harmed by any of the turrets (he may be able to be injured by his own burning spawn; in practice this doesn't seem to be a major problem).

The spawner will create biters and the biters will eventually attempt to mount an attack. This will cause the flamethrower turrets to activate.

Meanwhile, within the flamethrower turret range I have placed four circuit-controlled requester chests, configured to set requests from the circuit network. Four constant combinators are provided for configurability although it would also be possible to set these requests dynamically. Eventually the biters will cross the path of the chests (frequently, because they are chasing logistic bots who have come to drop off the requested objects), and the flame-thrower turrets will destroy the chest. Then construction bots will replace the destroyed chest and the cycle will continue.

So in short, whatever you program into the constant combinators will be requested by the robotic network, placed in the four requester chests, and destroyed by the flame-throwers.

It is important to ensure that construction bots do not repair the chests so effectively that they are never destroyed, which, with increasing robot speed research, could become a problem. To counteract this, the system only requests a small number of repair packs even though plenty of construction robots are kept in the network. If you're going for mega-science, you might need to keep your flamethrower turret damage upgrades moving along in tandem with robot speed upgrades (which as you know, if this applies to you, is not a big deal compared to the robot speed research).

I believe this structure is safe to have in your base. I don't think any biters are ever going to escape from this structure if it is properly fed with electricity, replacement parts, and heavy oil or whatever is supposed to go into flamethrower turrets (I typically don't use them so I have no clue really). It should most definitely be kept in an isolated robotic network. The middle of the square is not at all a safe place for robots to hang out. By design, this structure will send many, many robots to their graves. It should probably only be deployed if you are absolutely crushing the game. Also it's going to cause a lot of annoying alarms so I suggest turning those off in your audio settings.

Blueprint is below. Have fun!

[Edit: This is a very rough cut. Superior ways to implement biter-mediated item destruction likely exist. Some ideas:
  • Put the whole thing out of logistic range, but serviceable by disjoint construction bot networks (so that robots never cross the center of the square). Belt your trash in, and, instead of the four chests, either use (a) an inner square of wooden boxes that hem the biters in (hence, when they aggro, the boxes will be in their way) or (b) a maze of belts (in hopes that the biters decide to go after the belts.). I suspect (a) is the better idea, but even the crappy wooden boxes are surprisingly damage resistant (on par with stone walls, last time I checked) -- maybe bots will repair them too effectively. Worth a try.
  • Configure disjoint robotic networks to service the chests; everything works as above except that bots are not always crossing the center of the square.
  • I'd love to hear ideas, if anyone has them, for getting this done without flame turrets, which I suspect are very computationally expensive (a shame, since this thing is funny as hell to watch in operation; kinda makes me miss the early-0.15 bug where bots always freaked out trying to repair each other -- this would have made it even more amusingly wasteful and violent).
Also I should have mentioned that the requestor chests in the blueprint (on the right, not the ones in the square) are not going to work as configured; they should be re-blueprinted and placed just outside the network with inserters set in a one-tile robotic network gap configured to move those items into provider chests inside the isolated network. Obviously my blueprint is not very meticulously constructed, it's more of a proof-of-concept, apologies for that.]
Blueprint
Last edited by golfmiketango on Wed Dec 06, 2017 10:48 am, edited 3 times in total.

AcolyteOfRocket
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Re: Silly vanilla flare-stack alternative

Post by AcolyteOfRocket »

Finally - a proper way to dispose of the crappy pistol we start with ;-)

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